Beautiful prayer Acturus... here is a segment of an email I wrote a couples days ago, to an athiest friend, with whom I enjoy I enjoy a sharing relationship..
.Please forgive this, I am only saying this in self disclosure...I could not imagine existence without being able to share my heart/thoughts/prayers/songs/inner feelings with God. I do it all the time sometimes non stop for days, even when I am doing other things. I do not expect you to understand this, and ,maybe you do!. I just want to say, for me, I could live no other way. I do not tell anyone this either. since I am private by nature. Yet most every thought, for the most part, is shared, with Him, either overtly, or with the full understanding that He is there.You probably think that soumds skitzoid? sp?. But that is my reality. I ask for your forgiveness because I do not want you to think I am always trying to change or convert you, by bring this up, again.. I am not. I am just being transparent.
That is why I wish I could sing. As wonderful as everything is that is, even more wonderful than that, is feeling!. Feeling is more wonderful that knowledge. Even if I understood all mysteries, but if I had not love, than I am only a clanging gong. And knowledge combined with feeling is incredibly sublime. Why can't I communicate knowledge through feeling?.....
So when you wrote(prayed) this, it gave me a bit of a start .... "What is knowledge without YOU. It is a clanging cymbal. What is spirit if not YOUR SPIRIT. What new song do You require from the depths of our longing for YOU"...
We do so long for Him, to be more like Him, to live like Him, to die to ourselves like Him, to be filled with Him
1Co 13:1 Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity(love), I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.
1Co 13:2 And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity(love), I am nothing.
1Co 13:3 And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity(love), it profiteth me nothing.
These words are sobering just like the words of Mattthew 24 when Jesus says I never knew you, to those who say they did great works in his name. It is NOT our knowledge, nor our works, it is our LOVE
What I mean and I think you meant is to be motivated by love, to be willing to give our all, to feel the same love of Christ, ...motivated by the same love present in our Lord, as he forgave his enemies and poured out his lifes blood for the redemption of mankind
You also wrote..
To be able to communicate knowledge of YOU and sensitivity to that same hurt suffered by those who do not know their wounds and do not know the origin of their hurts vested against the bloodletting curdling errors of Babylon. Yet they press on vehemently in their defiance against their pains and numbing influences of balm inducing prayers that are not lifted up to You but up to their gods in shining armor leading them ever forward into the cutting wounding penalties of listening to the errors and lies of such a harlot as Babylon....
May that be all our prayers, God be merciful to them in their ignorance and blindness...may all our ministries and actions to each other, to those in Babylon, and those who are lost elsewhere, be motivated by love for them alone...
Yet, speaking only for myself, I truly hope, when all is said and done, that NOT all (emphasis on a minority) of those in Babylon(the babylon of the church) will be judged as "being weighed in the balances and found wanting" Because I have(want?) to believe, in light of this 1Cor 13 scripture, that even their insuficient understandings can be less important than love, and the love of Christ shed forth to others.. Because the apostle said all knowledge(and we have a LOT more knowledge) is of NO consequence if we do not have love, so apparently love is greater than knowledge. So when some missionary, forgives the tribesman, who killed his only son, and then he goes back to live among them, and be Christ to them, and introduce them to Christ, that he appears to me that did undergo judgements and will have shown Christlike character to have gold and precious stones of character and love, even if not of complete understanding.
So to me the biggest mystery of all is whether some of these great works were done in love for Christ and their neighbor. I think beautiful unselfish acts of forgiveness could only come through Jesus.
I am open to receiving anyone who loves or names Christ, unless they love the doctrines of eternal loss. That I would not understand, and is very sad. . That would not be LOVE. That would have to be burned away.
Doug